Sweet Little Mystery

My father is a ping-pong champion. He gets mad if you call it ping-pong, so I’ll call it table tennis. He used to play all the time, but now he doesn’t because of family obligations and the fact that the rest of his team died.

He called me up the other day to tell me about the new ping-pong, I mean table tennis themed movie, “Balls of Fury”. He even sent me the trailer. He’s not usually into this kind of humor, but he couldn’t believe they had made a movie about ping-pong. He was excited to see it, but told me he would have to go alone because no one he knew would want to go with him.

In his den, he has all of his table tennis trophies from all the times he came in first, second and third when he played table tennis competitively. Through the years the cleaning lady Berdine (not her real name; her real name is Kay), she bumped into most of the trophies with the vacuum causing them to fall onto the floor. Every trophy is missing something: an arm, a head, a racket, a leg, but they are still proudly displayed.

Today’s song is about another kind of missing. It’s about when someone is missing and the ambiguities that come along with that. My father has always seemed strange to me and I know he looks at me like I’m a stranger. He has something missing. It doesn’t matter what is missing. The point is something is missing.

Here is Julia Fordham singing “Sweet Little Mystery” from 1991.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/3517936ab9577b